Okee doke. I AM SURE PENDING ANY PARTICIPATION, THIS THREAD WILL BE FULL OF SPOILERS. IF YOU PLAN TO SEE THE MOVIE, GO SEE IT FIRST THEN COME BACK.

Saw this earlier today. It's a mixed bag, and there's no question the movie deserves five stars in terms of sheer inspiration. But my essential feeling, all in all: thumbs down. And honestly, I didn't expect to be saying this. I'm disappointed.

Kill Bill fails in many of the ways that concerned me since I first heard about the concept. Its obvious efforts to self-mythologize are so overblown that by the film's end they have become almost eye-rollingly tiresome, even boring (more on this later, I'd imagine.) I can't help but think it was a tremendous mistake to structure this movie as it is structured, and I feel confirmed in my suspicion that the "split" was a mistake also. A part of Tarantino's reason for agreeing to the proposed split was that he felt a 3-hour grindhouse picture was too pretentious, like it was a meditation on grindhouse cinema or something, which he didn't want. Ironically, that's exactly how part 1 plays -- like a self-fellating exegesis on Quentin's influences, but without any substance to back it up. And by substance, I don't mean deep Dostoevskian themes or anything -- I know that Kill Bill is, in a sense, meant to be a two-dimensional beast -- I just mean the substance necessary to instill some basic dramatic investment in the characters and their respective showdowns. Tarantino is so focused on the fact that this is a REVENGE movie, man, all right, like they USED to make, and, listen, all right, this is how revenge movies are fuckin’ MADE, all right – that he neglects to genuinely earn our emotional interest in this epic revenge quest, which, I’d say, is rather vital to the movie’s success. Sure, what happens to the Bride is awful, but there's just too little and it's too structurally jumbled ... nothing builds upon anything else dramatically ... the experimentation with structure here seems to lack any particular point, and the little Tarantino touches such as "chapter" breaks, etc. are almost comical here. Since all the back-story comes in part 2, we just know too little about these comic-booky characters and spend too little time with them in this movie to really get into anything on the level Tarantino seems to be asking for, especially during some of the key showdowns. The acting is also pretty bad, especially from Fox and Liu; as for Thurman, she gives it her all, but she’s just not that interesting or root-for-able.

A note on the dialogue: this is the first Tarantino flick I’ve seen where I can honestly say the profanity felt very forced. It feels right in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction ... a little less natural in Jackie Brown, but still OK for the most part. In Kill Bill the application of profanity is clunky and flat.

As for action, there are some really nice action sequences. All in all the action is reasonably strong ... a little jumbled at times, but, more or less good stuff. The fight with Go-Go-whats-her-face struck me as particularly well-crafted. The final battle with Lucy Liu's character is a real clunker, though. It’s more of a stand-off than a battle per se, and I think Tarantino was going for a Leone-meets-Kurosawa style drawn-out thing, but since we know so little about these characters and their relationship to one another, it just seems boring and self-important. Just because Leone can cut back and forth between a few guys ready to kill each other for five fuckin’ minutes in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly doesn’t mean anybody can do the same thing and automatically have it work as well. Beautifully shot, though ... really pretty scene.

As for the violence: I have this big thing about aesthetic consistency, and I was worried from the get-go that Kill Bill’s camp-violence would contrast with Tarantino’s penchant for realistic, uncomfortable violence. It does. He should’ve tossed the whole blood-spurts-in-geysers-like-in-the-good-old-days thing. Nothing like that happens until the latter half of the movie and by then a grittier context for the violence is already pre-established. The results? Awkward.

One positive point: great audio in this movie. The music is good and well-applied for the most part, even superbly applied at times, and there are a lot of little audio details throughout the film that I was rather taken with. And one other positive point: great opening sequence. I think the opening sequence straight through the music and opening credits, are the strongest thing in the whole film. For a second there, I thought this would be a movie to absolutely floor me. Alas.

Anyhow, I guess that's way more than enough for now ... as a side note, to anyone who disputes Tarantino's preoccupation with bare female feet -- I offer you Kill Bill. Rest assured, you will be enduring many extended close-ups of Uma's rather unsightly toes and foot-soles. At least Bridget Fonda's feet were kinda cute.

Anyhow ... between the opening scene, the anime sequence, and the fight with GoGo, Kill Bill is almost definitely worth the price of admission, but ... I feel it falls far short of what it could've been (and even what I believe Tarantino wanted it to be.)


K

On the other hand, Kill Bill rocked!

Wow. You obviously missed a lot of this movie to make this statement.

Anyhoo, I'm infuriated at Miramax's decision (and QT's acceptance) to cut this thing in two. Anyone who's seen this movie will understand why.

WTF???

Not "infuriated," I; I accepted the fact a long time ago, and was perfectly prepared for it. But February is a long wait.

As for "QT's acceptence," movies aren't like comics or whatever; you can't do certain things if the studio doesn't let you. Its not like a work of one guy that's easily moved around from publisher to publisher; we're talking about a multi-million-dollar project that somebody OWNS.

Nope. O-Ren Ishii's entire character development consists essentially of a segregated anime sequence. While I like the anime sequence, it doesn't give us any on-screen time with Lucy Liu herself, or her present character -- the burden is on Tarantino to make us understand and believe as an audience Liu IS this poor girl from the anime section, and he fails to do that. The only scene in which we spend any time getting to know the Lucy Liu O-Ren of the present before the final battle, is during her initiation-as-boss celebration. Her dialogue consists of a TERRIBLY awkward and poorly delivered outburst of profanity after she lops off a guy's head for questioning her nationality. One very badly acted scene in which she doesn't come off half as intimidating as she did as a child in the cartoon -- doesn't cut it.

Additionally, we know nothing about her part in what she did to The Bride other than that she happened to be there when they tried to kill her. We know nothing about her past relationship with the Bride. No really interesting tension or conflict has been established between them. We really know nothing about her at all except that she had a fucked up childhood and doesn't like her mixed nationality being mentioned.

And in ways we know even less about the Bride herself. Consequently, there's no emotional involvement when they have their final battle. We're seeing this rather pretentiously (if prettily) crafted duel before we've been given a reason to care about it -- or at least to care about it enough to take it as seriously as Tarantino obviously wants us to. A real snoozer of a climax, given the fact that the battle itself is just generally rather boring to boot. Pretty, but boring. And cartoonishly resolved.

K

Terrific film.

Less emphasis on action and violence than reviews and articles had led me to expect. The way in which verbal showdowns preceeded and even interrupted the physical ones really surprised and pleased me. Particularly the coffee break in the Coppermouth battle. An entirely unbelievable scenario, but played out in entirely believable dialog. The coda, with Thurman's identification with Nikki, the daughter -- and the invitation she extends to the daughter, to come find her should she grow into a vengence-minded young lady -- was touching.

That first battle is bound to fade in the memory of many viewers, in light of the sheer... glory... of that long and over-the-top Tokyo episode with which Vol. 1 climaxes. But I almost liked it more, as it had that immediate and almost primal element of two people facing off in a fight to the death. Having those two people be a woman who feels she's protecting a daughter and a husband and a woman who's lost her own daughter and husband (and to the first woman, to boot) only added to this tension.

I also appreciated it for its role in the structure of the film. Each of the chapters (or at least most of them) spotlights and honors a different Tarantino influence or set of influences. Lucy Lui's origin is, of course, anime. The Tokyo nightclub climax is grindhouse/martial arts. And the fight with Fox (even with its suburban setting) is straight out of Pam Grier territory. Less so than her slicker, more martial-arty soulsister Tamara Dobson, Grier fought down n dirty; she catfought, bitch-slapped and used what was lying around as weapons.

All the main actresses in the film are badasses; good work from them all. Hannah will spar with Thurman in Vol. 2; still, she gets some nice Farrah-haired, black-eye-patched screentime here: I, along with the rest of the audience, lost it when she emerged from her changeroom as a nurse, complete with a white eye-patch with a red cross on it. When her mission to poison the comatose Uma is called off by Bill, California Sidewinder loses it herself, a hilarious outburst that foreshadows the psycho killer I've read we are to meet in the second and final installment.

David Carradine plays a mysterious, largely off-camera Bill to good effect. Calling California on a cell to abort the poisoning attempt, he's sort of an anti-Charles Townsend advising one of his three Demons. Madsen gets the shortest shrift of all the DIVAS in Vol. 1, appearing wordlessly in the wedding massacre flashbacks, until he finally gets a (good) couple of lines about two minutes before the film ends, intriguing us as to exactly what his character will be like. He certainly has a different take the Squad's current circumstances than do any of the lady DIVAS.

And while Liu's sense of humor threatens to steal the show, the film belongs, in the end, not to writer/director Tarantino, but to leading lady Thurman. Before KBV1 premiered, I encountered from film fans considerable trepidation as to her ability handle the action, but these folks needn't have worried. She's completely confident and wholly giving of herself over to the physical sides of the role; Uma is clearly totally committed physically. No doubt stunt-doubling and editing helped her along, but whenever you *can* tell it's Thurman doing this or that, she's in control. She's commanding.

But what really makes her performance so superior is all the between-violence stuff. Again, for a movie hyped as an hour and forty minutes of non-stop bloodshed, there's an awful lot of downtime in Kill Bill Vol. 1 that calls for Thurman to take her character all over the map (and I'm not refering to the Bride's globetrotting, either). And yet Thurman has to pull it all together into a coherent and sympathetic character.

Which she does. The film is essential, or I should really say supposedly, heartless. But Thurman shows us not only how her character travels into heartlessness but also how some of the compassion and spirit she claims to no longer posess still remains. The aforementioned exchange between herself and Cottonmouth's daughter reveals a person still capable of understanding her own pain as something not entirely her own; she can see how she has made Nikki a potential clone of herself.

The emotional, the tonal, range doesn't stop there, as Thurman happily chats/flirts with Sonny Chiba in a little diner-type place; boils to a near-frenzy as she exacts revenge against Michael Bowen for having pimped out her comatose body; and makes us believe she is someone whose determination can force her atrophied legs into reanimated life. All of these sequences/sides of the character vary from each other markedly, and Thurman pulls them off -- and coelesces them -- beautifully.

Plus, Tarantino's given her what is, in particular, a Big Scene, her Big Moment. When the Bride wakes from her coma, realizing what has happened to her -- to her family -- the grief that crashes down upon her is Herculean. And Thurman's depiction of it equally sized, agony on a scalding, Greek-tragedy scale (for another modern-day equivalent, think Miranda Richardson in a similar reaction to bad news in the Louise Malle drama-potboiler, Damage). It's a great set-piece, it's a great bit of acting, and it's heartbreaking. Oh, okay, dammit, I admit it -- I started crying, myself.

But, despite all this, what the film is about, bottom line, is being cool and FUN FUN FUN. And it is. Beautifully, excitingly made -- plenty to see and hear (you WILL want this soundtrack), full of humor and -- despite my talk of "downtime" -- lots of action, adventure and violence. And, yes, fifty million gallons of blood.

While I'm not especially pissed about the halving of the work, I do find myself dying for February to come.

Matthew

Well, he failed to do it for you.

Her "sense of humor" ... ? Would this be the hilarity of her forced, awkward, profanity-laden torrent at the initiation, or the many drawn-out, slow-motion shots of her walking through hallways with her bodyguards in tow? Because aside from that, you've only a tedious duel which I don't think was meant to be particularly funny.

Beyond that -- different strokes for different folks. Glad you got more than I did out of it.

K

K,

You state that the beheading at the Yakuza celebration is forced and badly performed. I state that it's funny, a believable extension of both the character and the film in general, and quite well-performed.

Further proof that there is no such thing as one film, only as many films as there are viewers who see it.

Matthew

In defense of Madge, his is a perceptive, nuanced take on the film, and I’ve yet to read any professionals who’ve offered a more interesting take. But here’s a couple of fairly thoughtful opposing views on the film:

http://www.nypress.com/16/41/film/film.cfm

http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert1/wkp-news-killbill10f.html

My own view of the film and what’s been said here:

The Good:

Easily the most beautiful film of the year, KILL BILL’s a noholdsbar celebration of the violent aesthetic. Alexius Meinong, superplatonist and allaround whacky guy, suggested all intentional acts, even fictional creation, come from a mind-independent reservoir of perfect images. This film was pure violent form, a Meinongian videostore of cinema’s B-sided history of spectacle dismemberment and rapturous revenge. It’s really nothing short of brilliant the way Tarrantino moves from the hagiographic close-ups of a newly fashioned sword to the Kurosawan stillness before the battles to the reduction of blade and wielder action to the pure movement of silhouettes on blue, the Bride’s ballet through a field of blood geisers, and the near abstracted violence of blacks fighting with whites for screen space. It makes me moist just thinking about it!

And going one step further than Madget, I'd say that Tarantino has clearly surpassed Scorsese's influence in coopting songs for his films. No one uses the pop song like Tarantino, where each song he uses is forever wedded in the listener's mind to one of his images. The amazing credit sequence set to "Bang, Bang, Bang" is a case in point.

The Bad:

Contrary to the desires of Madget and others (see the Zoller-Seitz review linked above), KB makes no concessions towards a perceived need for dramatic justification. If anything lessens the acceptance of this film’s virtues, it’ll be that you aren’t given much of a reason for why any of the characters are any more deserving of death than any others, including the (anti)heroine. I’d ask why, outside of the individual viewer’s own particular demands is this a problem? Certainly one doesn’t criticize novelists for being more form-based than plot-oriented (well, some would, but not Madget).

However, I’m not going to pursue the justifying of Tarantino’s formalism with a comparison to formalistic novels. Rather, I’m going to question the basis for Madget’s complaint, that there was not a sufficient dramatic justification.for the revenge scenes. I wonder what’s really all that different about KB’s lack of a dramatic rationale and, say, Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO. For the majority of YOJIMBO, Sanjuro isn’t someone I’d want to hang out with and his motivation is largely pecuniary, but he does have a set of rules (arguably moral) that he obeys, as do his opponents. The Bride also has her rules (e.g., not squaring up the retribution), just like her main opponent (e.g., not killing her while she’s comatose). What does the film tell us about the motivations of the Bride? Clearly, she had love for her unborn child, she’s lived a life of detached murder based on pecuniary interests, and she believes in a (possibly moral) retribution if she and her loved ones are the aggrieved party. But, morally speaking, one shouldn’t feel any more empathy for the Bride than any other character in this film. They all operate on anger and vengeance, and I’d argue that KB justifies its scenes just as well as any other where those 2 motivations are what make for drama. We identify with the Bride's vengeance because of the film's POV is with her, just as in YOJIMBO. If it's easier to identify with Sanjuro than the Bride's vengeance, it would seem to be due to YOJIMBO's more traditional linear story. Nevertheless, the easier access to empathizing with the motivation in Kurosawa's film doesn't mean that there's any less motivation to be felt in KILL BILL. In point of fact, one (like Matthew) could make a good argument that the scene where the Bride wakes from her coma provides a more dramatic angle to all the revenge than the sum total of Mifune and Eastwood’s cold angry stares combined. I’d find it reasonable if one complains about the lack of drama in those films and this one, but not one or the other.

The Ugly:

I’ll join the chorus in complaining about the arbitrary splitting of the film ... alright, so it’s not really arbitrary, since Miramax will now make twice as much money and the theaters even more, since they can have more showings of a 90-minute film than a single 3-hour, particularly 2 90-minute films. But it’s arbitrary in the sense of the film’s story, and that’s what hurts the film. Much of a complaint such as Madget’s might actually be the result of the likely possibility that all the revenge sequences we see are, in terms of the overall story arc, dramatic buildups to the real scene of revenge, killing Bill. What might seem like a failed dramatic resolution to some viewers in killing the vipers in the first film might wind up being a more interesting take on killing sideline characters in the service of the ultimate revenge than is often given in likeminded films.

Well, that’s enough from me for now, I will say that I found Liu’s Yakuza beheading sequence very effective. How else is a 5 foot supremely cute girl supposed to yell “FUCK”?

Also, did all the Tarkovsky fans notice the shot of the Japanese overpasses lifted from SOLARIS? And what about the Brakhage, Fellini, DePalma, etc., etc.? I'm sure my being stoned means I missed tons of lifts/homages (as well as read a few where there weren't any).

And the Coens’ new film sucks ass.